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Tactical Missal

T
his year’s “Vatileaks” drama, which led to the conviction of the Pope’s
former butler for stealing thousands of classified documents from his
employer, has been a conspiracy theorists’ dream. But the kernel of news
unearthed by the story – that Rome has more than its fair share of cliques
and careerists – is hardly fresh. Meanwhile, a less eye-catching but far
more momentous church scandal has unfolded out of view. Mainstream
newspapers have barely noticed it. I refer to the imposition of a new
translation of the Mass across the entire English-speaking world. It is a
work with some virtues but profound flaws.

The Missal’s contents are inseparable from the circumstances of its
composition, a process deriving from the Second Vatican Council, which began
fifty years ago this autumn. The gathering proved seismic. Under the
prophetic leadership of Pope John XXIII, the Church that had turned its back
on most social and intellectual developments since the Enlightenment now
opened a window on to the modern world. Catholics were no longer to think of
themselves as warriors in a citadel, but pilgrims walking alongside those
who did not share their faith. Religious and other liberties were embraced.
Most striking for many laypeople, perhaps, was the reform of the Mass and
other rites set in train by the main council document on liturgy,
Sacrosanctum Concilium. Latin would give way to vernacular languages, partly
because of a sense that local churches were entitled to give expression to
the faith in widely differing cultural settings. Producing vernacular
translations involved a much-welcomed delegation of power. The process was
placed in the hands of national episcopal conferences, or, where several
countries shared the same language, joint bodies producing common versions.
For the twenty-six Houses of Bishops in the anglophone world, this task was
executed by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL).

Introduced in 1973, the new translation drew mixed verdicts. Many welcomed it
as a breath of fresh air; others, though, found it too mundane, and based on
a poorly judged preference for accessibility over quality. Those of a
theological bent detected a whiff of the Pelagian heresy (over-emphasizing
unaided human resources, downgrading the centrality of divine grace) in the
first generation of vernacular liturgy. As one thoughtful critic put it,
“Again and again, the accent is shifted towards us and our subjective
attitudes, and away from Christ and the objective realities of his work for
our salvation”. Many traditionalists, including the future Pope Benedict,
went further, ascribing declining church attendance in the West to the loss
of the Latin rite in the first place.

Catholics were no longer to think of themselves as warriors in a citadel

Defenders of the 1973 Missal tended to point out that it was produced at
speed, and never intended to be used in perpetuity. For this reason ICEL
embarked on a major revision during the 1980s and 90s. The experts involved
– shepherded by figures including Maurice Taylor, then Bishop of Galloway,
and John Page, a distinguished American classicist – greatly improved on the
efforts of their precursors, producing a version which was at once sinuous
and more accurate.

Take a simple example. One of the collects (opening prayers) for Easter Day
reads as follows in Latin: “Deus, qui hodierna die, per Unigenitum tuum,
aeternitatis nobis aditum, devicta morte, reserasti, da nobis, quaesumus,
ut, qui resurrectionis dominicae sollemnia colimus, per innovationem tui
Spiritus in lumine vitae resurgamus”. The 1973 translation of this reads,
“God our Father, by raising Christ your Son you conquered the power of death
and opened for us the way to eternal life. Let our celebration today raise
us up and renew our lives by the Spirit that is within us”. ICEL’s version,
published in 1998, is more stringent: “On this most holy day, Lord God,
through the triumph of your only-begotten Son you have shattered the gates
of death and opened the way to everlasting life. Grant, we beseech you, that
we who celebrate the festival of the Lord’s resurrection may rise to a new
and glorious life through the quickening power of your Spirit”.

But this second-generation translation never saw the light of day. In 1996,
the Congregation for Divine Worship (the Vatican’s liturgical department)
gained a new Prefect, Cardinal Jorge Medina Estévez. A Chilean by birth, he
did not speak English. ICEL had also produced a draft translation of the
Psalter using a limited amount of inclusive language, but early on in his
tenure Medina demanded that the entire project be scrapped. Matters
deteriorated sharply thereafter. Bishop Taylor was summoned to Rome and told
by the Cardinal to sack his staff and renounce long-standing links built up
with comparable bodies in other Churches. In his book It’s the Eucharist,
Thank God (2010), which chronicles this Vatican power grab, Taylor describes
the tone of Medina’s communications as “extreme and astonishing”.

In 2001, the Congregation for Divine Worship cemented its move by issuing an
instruction called “Liturgiam Authenticam” – termed “a disciplinary Exocet
missile” by Taylor – which demanded thoroughgoing literalism in all
approaches to translation. By this stage, given the very poor health of John
Paul II, the Catholic Church was effectively being run by a small group of
Vatican officials, including the future Benedict XVI. He, too, rejected
ICEL’s approach. Broadly, this was based on the dynamic-equivalence model,
under which entire sentences are reconceived as if written in normal modern
English, with subordinate clauses and the avoidance of repetition. By
contrast, Benedict holds that the translator’s job is not to make the reader
believe that the text was written in normal modern English (or any other
contemporary language) in the first place, but to suggest the flavour of the
original. This, he thinks, can only be achieved by a measure of imitation
and by refusing to gloss the meaning of the original through paraphrase.
Acting hand in glove, Medina and the future Pope pursued their goal
uncompromisingly. As well as usurping the legitimate authority of
English-speaking bishops’ conferences, the two men also ensured that all
future translations intended for use in the anglophone world were monitored
by a new commission created under Vatican auspices called Vox Clara.

So the new Missal has arrived on a tide of ill feeling. What of its contents?
Certainly, all trace of Pelagianism in the 1973 version seems to have been
eradicated. The Latin is of course rendered more exactly, but frequently at
the price of losing elegance or pith. Some of the collects are too stilted
to lend themselves to public recitation. Reading as though composed by
incompetent pedants, they should have been sent back for revision at the
earliest chance. Tellingly, no account seems to have been taken of the work
of Anglicans, who after all have a centuries-old advantage over Roman
Catholics in the field of vernacular translation. Much discussion has taken
place in church circles over prominent examples such as the invitation to
Communion, in which “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the
word and l shall be healed” has been replaced by “Lord, I am not worthy that
you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be
healed”. Sometimes the language is outlandishly baroque. I couldn’t help
noticing sniggers in clerical ranks during Holy Week this year over a phrase
such as “may merit to become the pleasing fragrance of Christ” or the
petition “that we may be so inflamed with heavenly desires that we may
attain festivities of unending splendour”.

Holy Week is a rarity, of course. The largest problems thrown up by the new
Missal are encapsulated in much more familiar contexts such as the Canon of
the Mass, a notable example being the priest’s prayer over the cup in the
First Eucharistic Prayer. The Latin marking this solemn moment runs as
follows:

“When supper was ended, he took the cup. Again he gave you thanks and praise,
gave the cup to his disciples, and said: ‘Take this all of you and drink
from it: this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting
covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven.
Do this in memory of me.’”

This is now changed to:

“In a similar way, when supper was ended, he took this precious chalice in his
holy and venerable hands, and once more giving you thanks he said the
blessing and gave the chalice to his disciples, saying, ‘Take this, all of
you, and drink from it: for this is the chalice of my blood, the blood of
the new and eternal covenant which will be poured out for you and for many
for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in memory of me.’”

A balanced verdict ought to acknowledge the partial merits of the new version,
including its rendering of simili modo. But “chalice” sounds phoney by
comparison with “cup”. Calix is a Latinization of the Greek kulix, which
means “drinking cup”. Controversy has also been stoked over the rendering of
“pro multis”. At first sight, it appears more accurate to say that Christ
died “for many” rather than “for all”, but a number of scholars have
insisted that the Semitic languages underlying the Gospels use “many” to
mean “virtually everybody”. Several times this year I’ve heard more
liberal-minded priests sticking to the 1973 formulation, perhaps out of
habit, but also perhaps out of a concern that the new words point to a more
exclusivist understanding of salvation.

The 1973 version corrects the unsettling implications of the Latin, which
portrays an angry God who demands blood

There is a good deal of clumsiness elsewhere in the Eucharistic Prayers,
perhaps the worst example being “Look, we pray, upon the oblation of your
Church, and, recognising the sacrificial victim by whose death you willed to
reconcile us to yourself, grant that we . . . may become one body, one
spirit . . .”. This replaces the crisper “Look with favour on your Church’s
offering, and see the victim whose death has reconciled us to yourself.
Grant that we . . . may become one body, one spirit . . .”. As well as
sounding better, the 1973 version had the merit of correcting the unsettling
implications of the Latin, which portrays an angry God who demands blood as
propitiation for human sin. Though accepted by some believers, this
atonement theology is not part of ancient Christian tradition.

Probably the central ritual in human culture, the Eucharist is rightly
understood as a celebration of love’s mending of broken hearts. By enacting
Jesus’s command at the Last Supper, it proclaims what human beings ought to
be for the sake of exercising pressure on how we are. Given the importance
of English, especially as a second language, it is highly regrettable that
anglophone Catholics have been so poorly served by translators entrusted
with such an important task.

Anyone familiar with Benedict XVI’s career will know of his many cris de coeur
on behalf of traditionalists outraged by the loss of the Latin rite. He saw
the move as a mark of liberal authoritarianism, and complained before his
election as Pope of feeling treated like a “leper” for expressing his views.
Now raised to a position of supreme authority in the Church, he could have
promoted the consensual culture he judges to have been lacking during the
1960s and 70s. He failed to do so. The irony of all this hardly needs to be
pointed out. Given the pastoral implications of poor liturgy – the Pope is
at least right on this point – a sizeable part of the Catholic world will be
living with the collateral damage caused by his and Cardinal Medina’s
“Exocet” for generations to come.

Rupert Shortt is Religion editor of the TLS and a Visiting Fellow of
Blackfriars Hall, Oxford. His most recent book is Christianophobia: A faith
under attack, published last month.